Senior Honors Studio

Isabela Arboleda-Ocoro

Georgia Collyer

Oscar Garay

Sarah Gelleny

Nick Horcher

Kat Nestser

Rebecca Panos

Tasneem Sarkez

Alaya Shah

Landscapes of Ornamentation is a group exhibition curated by Marie Catalano, and features the artwork of nine BFA Studio Art Majors in the final year of their undergraduate studies at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development’s Department of Art & Art Professions. The exhibition marks the ten year anniversary of the Senior Honors Studio in the BFA Studio Art Program.

Curated by Marie Catalano

Organized by Jesse Bransford - Director of Undergraduate Studies, Tammy Lee Brown - Director, Planning and Communications, Maya Pollack - Senior Honors & Studio Coordinator, Howie Chen - Director, 80WSE Gallery, Jon Huron - Manager, 80WSE Gallery, Olivia Andrews - Exhibitions Coordinator, 80WSE Gallery, Paula Rondon - Digital Studios & Technology Manager, Roxana De Leon - Exhibition Tech, Rachel Chen - Exhibition Assistant, Sophia Clinard-Rubio - Exhibition Assistant, Cynthia Li - Exhibition Assistant, Robert Rhinehart - Copy Editor, Kareem Moumina - Senior Studio Operations, Assistant Jenny Noguchi - Publication Designer, Silvia Abisaab - Studio Photographer, Carter Seddon - Gallery Photographer

Advisory support by Nancy Deihl - Clinical Assistant Professor, Department Chair, Art & Art Professions, Steinhardt, Jesse Bransford - Clinical Assistant Professor of Studio Art & Director of Undergraduate Studies, Art & Art Professions, Steinhardt, Shadi Harouni - Assistant Professor of Video and Photography, Art & Art Professions, Steinhardt, Priyanka Dasgupta - Faculty, Art & Art Professions, Steinhardt

Thanks to Silvia Abisaab, Olivia Andrews, Jesse Bransford, Tammy Lee Brown, Kyung-Me C, Ken Castronuovo, Howie Chen, Priyanka Dasgupta, Dana DeGiulio, Nancy Deihl, Monica Driscoll, Hina Haider Fancy, Neil Goldberg, Chase Hall, Shadi Harouni, Jon Huron, Erin Johnson, Marlene McCarty, Vonetta Moses, Lila Nazemian, Alison Nguyen, Olivia Noble, Jenny Noguchi, Laurel Ptak, Adam Putnam, Erika Ranee, Paula Rondon, and Robert Szantyr.

A special thank you to the Chen Cui Family Art Practice Fund for their continued support of the BFA Program.

*Broadway Windows gallery is a series of five street-level display windows located at the corner of Broadway and East 10th Street. The installations can be viewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Landscapes of Ornamentation brings together nine works of art spanning painting, photography, sculpture and handcraft traditions that propose non-figurative and non-human ways of representing selfhood. Drawing on personal archives and material culture, the artists in this exhibition grapple with what it means to be seen on one’s own terms. Collectively, they engage with a wide variety of cultural artifacts and subject matter to expand on signifiers of identity, challenge legibility, and contend with misrecognition.

The title Landscapes of Ornamentation comes from theorist Jose Esteban Munoz who used the phrase to discuss camouflage motifs in the work of queer artists as a way to rearrange recognizable, normative systems of order. According to Munoz, these hopeful reinterpretations of the world involve the important process of self reflection to gain new perspectives, a mode of contemplation that “speaks of a critical imagination that begins with self-analysis and a vaster social critique of how the world could and indeed should be.”* Here, the artists closely examine the visual evidence from their everyday lives and use a variety of methods to negotiate its legibility reflective of Munoz’s ornamented landscapes: they reconfigure, layer, embellish, and encode elements culled from the existing world, hiding meaning in plain sight. In doing so, they reimagine prescribed subjectivities to exceed categorization.

The exhibition begins with a series of hybrids: compressed geographies in Arboleda-Ocoro’s double-exposed contact sheet, cultural signifiers in Sarkez’s painting, and the conflation of personal and national histories in Nestser’s miniature book. It includes visual reconfigurations of the preexisting environment, like the patterned surroundings of Garay’s church and the altered Levi’s tag in Collyer’s work. The exhibition also draws on personal and inherited objects like Shah’s chai table embellished with photographs and Horcher’s symbolically encrypted necklace. Finally, it concludes with folklore and traditional handcraft as vehicles for transformation, as evidenced in Gelleny’s band of anthropomorphized critters suggestive of other worlds and Panos’s crocheted declaration of reconstruction. Across these varied subjects and forms, the artists carve out space for multiplicity, fluidity, and expanded notions of self — aspects of a future world that might reflect their own images back to them.

*Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 143.

Catalogue Essays